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User talk:Janaschi
Wikia There's nothing at all inappropriate about your message. I'm not even sure what you think might be. So don't worry. I have indeed considered it, but I feel there are two problems with the idea. First and foremost, I really hate that there is this massive duplication of work between the two sites. It's such a giant waste of energy. Second is that I feel The Vault is considerably behind in content, probably largely due to a particular person's obsession with editing. Trying to play catch-up with someone who spends their entire day copy/pasting from the CK seems futile. I would prefer to fix the problem with Nukapedia and make it more hospitable to the point that forces could be joined somehow. I'm considering some kind of petition-for-removal. I suspect it's a waste of time, though. I feel like everyone over there just blindly respects the guy due to his massive edit count. People are all, "YOU ARE A MACHINE!" or "CONGRATS ON 100,000 EDITS!" Like the number of edits is directly related to his value or the quality of his contributions. I wonder if they would still respect him if they actually went through a couple of days' worth of his changelogs. Not only does he make no-op changes multiple times a day (gee, I wonder what purpose that might serve...) but he also tends to edit the same page 3-6 times in a row over the span of mere minutes. It's like he considers "Submit" to be the preview button or something, because when I look at the individual edits, he's basically fixing all the things he broke on his first edit, or putting in the stuff he forgot to add the first time in his mad rush for +1 to the edit count. Truth be told, I think he does it that way entirely on purpose. Carefully leave out stuff on the first edit, mislabel or misword a couple of things, and ta-da, you have an excuse for more edits. He does way too many things that point to deliberate padding for it to be just a coincidence. There is no question in my mind that this is why he never summarizes his edits. The guy could contribute exactly the same content in about 1/5th of the edit count, or probably less, if he weren't in a mad rush to submit, submit, submit. And that's all ignoring the real problem I've been having with him, which is the way he acts like the wiki is his and he can make any damned unilateral decision he wants, with no discussion and no interest in reconsideration even when challenged. The whole thing really pisses me off. Felice Enellen (talk) 18:16, December 30, 2016 (UTC) : Don't get the wrong idea. I recognize that he actually does contribute a lot to the wiki. But he can do that as a regular user. I don't want him to leave. I just want his title removed. You don't need to be a bureaucrat to edit a thousand times per day.† For that matter, your edit count, or the contents of your edits, are not in any way a qualification to be a bureaucrat. I don't honestly see a single thing about him that does qualify him to be in charge of the wiki. What I see is someone who is narrow-minded, stubborn, self-centered and authoritarian. He may be great when you get to know him, but a wiki is full of strangers, not close friends. Strangers are going to see the version I see. If he can't interact with strangers in a way that encourages people to keep editing, or if he can't restrain himself from interacting at all, then he's absolutely the wrong man for the job. He is entirely qualified to be an editor, though. : Regarding the policy idea, I've been mulling that idea over myself. The problem I see, having seen many of the policy votes in the past on the forum, is that people tend to be very non-confrontational. Anyone over there who's been paying the slightest attention is going to be well aware that I have been criticizing him and arguing with him about edits, so they will know right away that this is about him, and that if they vote in favor of my proposal, they will effectively be voting against him, and he will know it, and people reeeaaally don't like to have the people they know upset with them. The stranger can be upset, no problem, but the guy they see every day, that's awkward. It'll just be a lot of red X's with no commentary attached. Yes, I'm kind of being defeatist here. Meh. : Of course, the next logical thought is probably, "Well, then, the proposal to remove him is even less likely to gain any traction," and I would agree, but I think sometimes it's important to respond to a big problem (which is how I see this, accurate or not) with a big reaction, even if the big reaction isn't going to change much (or anything). Sometimes it's about shining a spotlight. I'm sure a proposal for removal would result in a near- or fully-unanimous vote against, but I also think that at least a few people might consider paying more attention to his behavior. Conflict bothers people, but so does curiosity. : I'll think about both ideas for a while before I do anything, though. Plus I sent a missive to Chad and I think it would be inappropriate to move forward elsewhere before he responds. : Anyway, I'm sorry to be so verbose about this. I feel a great need to rant about all the things that are bothering me. I'm sure it's tedious to read. I admit I get bored very quickly when someone won't shut up about their own office politics, or the like. It's just that you made the terrible mistake chose to show some empathy and I couldn't resist the opportunity. Sorry. :) :___ † He's actually done that. 1000 edits in a single day. To do that, even if you were awake and editing for the entire 24 hour period, you'd have to edit and submit every 86.4 seconds. If he actually sleeps, uses the toilet, and occasionally eats, it's more like every 50 seconds. I shudder to think what kind of quality edits he was making that day. : Felice Enellen (talk) 00:27, December 31, 2016 (UTC) : By the way, completely unrelated: Who is in the image in your avatar? It seems to be a painting...? Her face is so strikingly attractive I can barely look away from it. Sorry, I guess that sounds creepy, but it really is an amazing image. Felice Enellen (talk) 03:54, December 31, 2016 (UTC) :: Ah, you're a writer? I'm jealous of those who can write anything significant. I would very much like to be able to transport people to other worlds the way others have transported me. I don't have the stick-to-it-iveness to stay with a project like a book long enough to make anything meaningful, though. That, and I may also not have the talent, but it's hard to say when I never give myself the chance to exercise it. :) I do know I wrote some really terrible short stories when I was a teenager, but I think maybe that's normal. ;) :: Anyway, I was reminded to come check on this talk page because I just posted to the other wiki's discussions forum, about edit summaries. I decided to let a cooler head prevail and went in the direction you suggested, rather than calling for his removal outright. We'll see if anyone responds. I don't expect much, to be honest. While multiple people have told me they have issues with his editing, I've never once seen anyone say anything negative to him. I don't know if they're scared of him, or of conflict, or what. :: Speaking of which, I think Chad's blowing me off--he cited some real world pressures preventing him from responding to me, but at the same time I've seen him lounging on wiki chat for hours, not to mention that he also just helped give the very person I'm talking about a lifetime achievement award. I hate to jump to conclusions, but it really doesn't feel very likely that he intends to be helpful in this matter. I dunno. I'm feeling very negative right now. Seems like no one cares. Meh. Felice Enellen (talk) 22:45, January 4, 2017 (UTC) ::: Do you mean he's literally a politician? That would explain the subject matter he mentioned when he said he was busy. Well, that would explain a lot in general. Thanks for the heads-up. I'd more or less come to the same conclusion, just on less information. I haven't told him to get stuffed, but I've moved on to other things. We'll see if he ever does respond. He still has the opportunity. I used to have reasonably pleasant conversations with him on chat. I'd prefer to give him a chance and stay on decent terms. But I get what you mean about losing your editing mojo. I felt like I was getting into gear and then had two or three very questionable reverts thrown in my face in a row and suddenly I felt like there was no point. I'm not a heavy editor, but I make an effort to research my edits and do things right, so when js comes along and says, "Nah," and reverts them, I'm losing a lot of time I've invested to his selective whims. Totally discouraging. Meh again. :) Felice Enellen (talk) 23:30, January 4, 2017 (UTC) <------ Yeah, I've interacted with some of those people over the last year or so. I was hoping to get useful input from Peace especially, but he seems to have gotten stuck on an example I mentioned in passing because he assumed it was about him and that I was calling him out on something. Really unfortunate--I actually like him and now I suspect he's angry at me over the misunderstanding. :( I hope he reads my response. I'm also somewhat interested in Gunny's response, if he has one. His work is good, though I sometimes don't like his attitude towards users. I think he'll either say "Yes, there's no excuse not to summarize," because he believes in rules being rules, or he'll tell me to get stuffed, because he hates whiners. I'm not sure which. :) Ah, while I was writing that, Chad managed all of a sudden to find the time to write a good sized contrarian blurb. I guess I know which way the wind blows with him now. Glad I didn't wait. Felice Enellen (talk) 01:58, January 5, 2017 (UTC) : Well, this is going nowhere. Seems like no one over there is willing to understand that edit summaries serve a historical purpose to anyone other than patrollers. Starting to think I should have gone with petitioning for the removal of his bcrat rights instead. Equally likely to end with nothing but I could have spent the time pointing out all the things he does and maybe instilled some doubt. Meh #3. I suck at revolution. Felice Enellen (talk) 17:23, January 5, 2017 (UTC) :: Yeah, it looks dead in the water. I think my name is mud at this point. I'm sorry you wasted your time giving me advice and support. For what it's worth, I did very much appreciate that. It's hard to be defeated so quickly and completely, probably somewhat by my own hand for having worn my heart on my sleeve with him in full view of the others, so it helps to have had at least one person offer me some moral support. Thank you anyway, and I'm sorry I failed to do something useful for either of us (or anyone) with this fire in my belly. I think I'll just go isolate for a while and try to forget I that cared about any of this. Felice Enellen (talk) 15:04, January 6, 2017 (UTC) Begin Again I think the lack of new editors is probably due to several factors. My own theories about the unapproachability of that particular wiki aside, I also have the impression that Wikia-which-is-now-Fandom would happily leave its wikis in the past if it were possible to do so without generating too much of an outcry. They seem extremely focused on Discussions of late, from what I see. I think Fandom's model is shifting towards live, ephemeral chatter about games, rather than static encyclopedic information. It may be that people casually asking each other for semi-reliable information via word-of-mouth ultimately generates more pageviews/adviews, especially since it causes them to be in an environment that provides many opportunities to create or join other conversations. That gives them reasons to keep returning, even if they don't actually need specific game information. I've seen people refer to the discussions themselves as "the wiki", clearly never having been outside of that part of the site. That was amusing, but not in a good way. I'd be quite surprised if anyone charting the 10-year course for Fandom sees actual fans and the things they care about as anything more than a means to a end. To be fair, business is business. Passion doesn't pay the bills. It'd be nice to think people running a site about fandom are doing it both because they want to run a successful business and because they're interested in the material, but I've worked and interacted with the upper echelons of large companies, and I know better. Passionate/visionary people, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, are metaphorical unicorns, really. ... Warning: Long, loonnng personal story incoming ... read at your peril leisure ... this will not be on the final exam ... read only if interested ... I know I'm very long-winded and I don't actually expect most people to read everything I write ... I take no offense ... etc. ... I worked for one company for nine years, doing game development, and by the end of my time there, the guy who ended up in charge of the whole operation (about 700 people by then, I think) was someone who preferred to play golf over video games. That sounds like a stereotypical joke, perhaps from a Dilbert comic, but I actually live on the edge of the golf course he played on, so I know how often he played. :) I never once saw him playing a video game other than during our periodic internal product reviews. He was there to run the business, pure and simple. Passion for the product was the job of the people in the trenches. Ideally, having a pure businessman in charge can actually work, but he would often make ill-advised course corrections due to his lack of intimate knowledge about gaming, gamers, and game development itself. To be fair, his decisions would typically make a sort of standard business sense, perhaps in the context of a straightforward product like a vacuum cleaner, but they would not make sense in terms of long-term game development or continuing franchises. That in turn would destroy the passion and morale of the people in the trenches. With him at the helm, that company went from making innovative games for well-known franchises to making low-budget phone games. I saw where things were headed and left before that happened, as did most of the other senior people. I was sad, though--I really liked the people I worked with, management notwithstanding. The worst I saw was when I had the bad luck of joining the Xbox first-party publishing group at Microsoft right around the time Microsoft installed several former EA executives in Xbox's leadership positions. Don Mattrick and Phil Spencer came in and took the reins, hiring a bunch of their former EA cronies colleagues to head the groups that comprised the Xbox division, including mine. I arrived in the warm glow of the great success of the 360's launch and early life, but in the years I worked there, I saw the prosperity, excitement, and high morale disappear, replaced by depression, lack of motivation, and fear for job security. As a matter of fact, the infamously-disastrous Xbox One reveal occurred during the last few months that I was there. If you were gaming at the time, you're probably familiar with it. That was a great example of executive ignorance and hubris. They charted the course that they figured had the most profitability in it, and ignored the numerous internal gasps of dismay that their plans were met with. These were guys who were used to steamrolling any dissent and doing it their way. Do you remember the guy who got fired for saying people would have to "#DealWithIt" on social media? He was one of the managers on my own team. That was basically the prevailing attitude coming down from management: people might not like always-on DRM, but they'd deal with it. When I heard this, I told my own manager, "No, they won't, they'll switch to Sony," but he just said, "Nah, they'll deal with it. People love Xbox." I wish there were an :eyeroll: emote to use here. :) Anyway, I've gone on at far too much length about this. I'm really just saying that it's pretty common for tech companies to end up under the leadership of people with experience running regular businesses, but who do not really understand the nature of these new industries and their audiences. I think that's happening with Wikia-now-Fandom. I think someone's decided to set a course that caters to the stereotypical short-attention-span millennial types, rather than those who like to dive deep into lore and learn everything there is to know about their favorite subjects. I really don't know what the future holds for the Wikia side of the company. It's kinda worrisome. I hope, for the sake of The Vault, that Gamepedia doesn't follow suit. Felice Enellen (talk) 19:04, January 6, 2017 (UTC)